


Black October

by Snegurochka



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-02-06
Updated: 2007-02-06
Packaged: 2017-10-10 23:29:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/105629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snegurochka/pseuds/Snegurochka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>It's a blind addiction, he assumes, like heroin or skydiving – a moment of pure, naked bliss, stripped of rationality and responsibility and, most importantly, remorse. The named will always die, after all, while the nameless persevere.</i></p><p>2,400 words. NC-17. Remus/anonymous men (not a mystery pairing). Written for a fuq-fest at pervy_werewolf. February 2007.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Black October

At eleven p.m. on October 31, 1982, Remus Lupin is flat on his back, a blindfold hugging his temples and scratching the bridge of his nose, and a coil of rope holding his wrists securely over his head. There is a man over top of him, breathing, moving, touching. He straddles Remus's hips and slides their cocks together, adding a drop of oil to ease the friction, his hands pushing down on Remus's chest and the thick saliva he swallows with every third panting breath echoing like a rockslide in Remus's ears.

The man's cock is bigger, Remus can feel it – thicker at the base and weighing on his own cock with a heavy balance that slips with every snap of the man's hips. They grind together slowly, picking up speed as precome joins the oil and slicks them together, Remus's hips pushing up to match the man's rhythm and ask for more, harder, _more_, but he won't ask for it, can't ask for it, because isn't it enough that he comes here at all, aching and desperate and willing to lie down for a stranger like this? So he doesn't beg. He only writhes, allowing himself the occasional soft gasp, letting his blind eyes imagine the features on the body crushing against him and his sensitive skin fill in the remaining blanks.

"Fuck," the man moans, his voice ragged, lifting a hand from Remus's chest to grasp their cocks together. They are too big, they won't fit in his hand, and Remus ends up with fingernails in the underside of his cock, squeezing him and scratching like ice.

He wants to cry when he comes, but he doesn't, because that would be stupid. He's already done one too many stupid things tonight, after all; no need to add another.

*

It's early morning when he arrives home, sated and exhausted and filled with shame. The ragged tiles cut his feet in the shower and the water runs too hot, scorching his chest before he can jump away and turn it down.

"Ow," he mutters, wrenching the cold tap higher, and then for good measure, "fuck."

They are the last words he speaks for several days. It's not as though he has anyone to talk to, after all, and he's not yet mad enough to talk to himself.

He scrubs at his skin under the lukewarm spray and forces his mind to go blank. He doesn't know why he went back there tonight – _tonight! – _and he doesn't want to. He wants only to wash the stranger's smell from his body and rinse the memory of hard, aching anonymity from his mind.

*

On October 31, 1983, Remus wakes early. The wind is brisk, howling outside his bedroom window as a sliver of orange light threatens to render the curtains useless. He squeezes his eyes closed and clutches at the sheets with both hands.

No. Not tonight. He won't give in.

His prick has other ideas, though, he knows it does, and as soon as he thinks it, he feels the flesh begin to swell. The scratch of the sheets makes him shiver as his cock fills, pushing up his stomach and catching in the rough fabric.

He imagines a warm body beside him, face obscured by the shadows but hands steady and knowing. They spread over his body, mapping his chest and stomach, sliding down his thighs, and then there's a mouth. Following the trail of warm, pressing fingers, a mouth slides over his skin, hot and wet and insistent. It could be anyone, he doesn't care. He doesn't want eyes that would look at him and know too much, or lips that would claim to love him but inevitably end up kissing someone else.

He wants only this: wandering hands and a faceless mouth, hardness grinding against him and nobody making him any promises.

Nobody there to betray him.

He groans and fists himself hard, arching his back and pretending the cock in his hand belongs to someone else – someone tall and thick and rough and coming, coming, pulsing into his hand and shuddering against him, someone he's never met before and never will again.

At ten p.m., he throws back the hood of his cloak and enters the club. He knows he shouldn't, but he also knows by now that the guilt is what arouses him.

By ten-thirty he's had three drinks and a blow job.

By the time the clock strikes midnight, he's on all fours on a filthy mattress, a plastic Muggle pumpkin moving in and out of his vision as a strange man thrusts into him, hard and slick inside his arse.

*

By 1984, he's in France and the guilt has morphed into something else – routine, probably, the quiet understanding that there is an appointment to be kept, like a job interview or an annual trip to the dentist.

He drives into the city methodically and picks up the first willing man he sees. It costs him more than his monthly wages for a fuck, so he settles for a blow job – no swallowing, that's extra – and reclines into the seat, eyes closed and nightmares of the ghosts of Halloweens past alive in his mind.

*

In 1985 he can't actually find anyone to fuck him, and that makes him feel even worse.

*

In 1986 he tries penetrating. Not for the first time ever, of course, just for the first time on Halloween. It happens by accident, really; after last year, he thought the spell was broken, that he no longer had to abide this penance.

He is back in England now and has accepted an invitation to a colleague's party and surrounded himself with friends - or acquaintances who can provide a reasonable facsimile, at least. _Dia de los Muertos_ is the theme, all the rage that year among the twentysomething Muggles who feel sudden if belated outrage at the Falklands and Nicaragua and have decided that Mexican-themed parties count as political activism. There are weak margaritas and soggy quesadillas and approximations of skulls hanging from the ceiling on frayed lengths of string. The flat is too hot, the music too loud, and the company tepid at best.

"Not thinking of leaving already, are you?" the young man asks him, sliding up to him and breathing hotly in his ear to be heard over the music.

Remus lowers his drink and turns his head. The man must be barely eighteen, just a boy, really, with wide eyes and a flirty smile. _I used to know boys like that_, he thinks sadly, feeling grey and useless. _I used to be a boy like that_. "You think I should stay?" he asks, keeping his face blank and his voice even. He's not desperate, after all, not anymore. He won't beg the boy for it.

But dark lashes flutter over black-lined eyes and a tongue stained strawberry-red runs over a full bottom lip, and Remus can't help but instinctively glance around for a private nook.

The boy smiles at him and saunters away, slim hips swaying, and casts a glance over his shoulder before disappearing into the loo.

Remus sets his drink down, closes his eyes, and decides that this must be exactly what _addiction_ feels like.

The boy already has his shirt off by the time Remus clicks the loo door shut. He presses up behind him until the boy is flat against the wall, the hard muscles of his back and shoulders moving under Remus's chest and soft gasps already falling from his mouth. Remus knows how he feels; there's no rush quite like getting fucked by a stranger, opening your body in the most intimate way to someone you neither know nor trust.

He could hurt you. He could kill you. He could be tricking you, after all, and you wouldn't be the first man to have your face kicked in and the word _faggot_ carved across your chest by that handsome stranger from the club.

"Do you trust me?" he breathes into the boy's ear, one hand curling over his shoulder and the other pushing his trousers down.

"Yes," the boy murmurs, throwing his head back and closing his eyes as Remus kicks his legs apart, fisting his own cock and nudging it into the boy's cleft.

"Stupid," he mutters, pushing forward harder than he should, but the boy is already slick, already prepared, and that enrages Remus even more. "Really fucking stupid."

The boy casts an alarmed glance over his shoulder at that, but Remus keeps pushing, steadily filling the boy until any lingering doubts are silenced and the boy lets his cheek slide against the wall, a soft moan on his parted lips.

Remus wonders what this boy has lost, what demons he chases, what injustice has been done to him to make him seek this out, and if the pressure around his cock wasn't so exquisite he might even have asked. Instead, he pulls back, sliding his cock through gripping heat and then thrusting up again, losing himself in the warmth and the clench and the way a hundred hands and mouths never quite feel like _this_, sucking him in and pulling him under.

He establishes a rhythm, tilting his hips and sliding through the boy's natural resistance, both of them groaning at each thrust, but then Remus makes the mistake of opening his eyes, and he remembers with a wave of nausea why he's never done it this way before, why he should always be on his knees or on his back, eyes closed or shadows obscuring skin. Against the wall like this, with the light burning his eyes, all he can see is soft flesh underneath him that isn't his to love, and the smooth arch of a shoulder that will never nudge him and joke about the Slytherins' taste in dress robes.

"Yeah," the boy breathes, and Remus snaps back to reality. "Oh, yeah…"

He thrusts harder, suddenly wanting only to teach this boy a lesson about letting strange men pin him against a wall like this, to show him exactly how dangerous it is to get fucked this way.

"Oh, _yeah_," the boy moans again, dropping a hand from the wall to pump his own cock, Remus's fingers bruising his hips.

Remus wants to shake him, stain him, scream at him to give this up, to find someone who loves him and never let that person go, to save himself for the ones who have names, who will buy him dinner first, who will spend the night and even make him coffee in the morning.

His head is pounding as he comes, clutching at the boy and feeling his cock jerk deep inside him, his ears roaring and black colour shifting behind his eyes. Far away, he feels the boy clenching around him, shaking with his own release and slumping against the wall with Remus still sprawled over his back, blood thick in his veins and the faces of the dead dancing in his vision.

He almost laughs when he realises he doesn't know if the image is his own subconscious or just a cheap plastic party favour hanging over the bathroom sink.

It doesn't matter, really. The dead are still dead, whether they were made of flesh or plastic.

*

It continues year after year.

No matter what else changes in his life or whether he's not actually single when October draws to yet another dismal close, Remus heads out into the night on the thirty-first, sometimes in denims, sometimes in a cloak, and looks for a stranger willing to fuck him, or be fucked.

It's a blind addiction, he assumes, like heroin or skydiving – a moment of pure, naked bliss, stripped of rationality and responsibility and, most importantly, remorse. It's something that gets him off, a cheap thrill with no strings and no obligations.

He doesn't need to admit that it's more than that. By 1991 it's been ten years, and he marks the anniversary by stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that it's an anniversary of anything at all, preferring to simply drop to his knees in a stale alley and swallow the cock of any man who agrees to buy him a drink.

The named will always die, after all, while the nameless persevere.

* * *

 

**October 31, 1981**

The door slams shut and the picture frames on the wall shiver, the entire flat tense with the lingering sound of shouting, throwing, accusing.

_Where have you been going, you fucking traitor? Tell me where the fuck you go at night!_

Remus sits on the sofa, a shattered Ramones record at his feet and the smoke from Sirius's cigarette still thick in the air. His bare arms tremble with gooseflesh.

_This looks bad for you, Moony. Really fucking bad. Think you'll ever see James again now? You think I'll ever tell you where they are when you'll take it straight to the fucking Death Eaters? Fuck you_.

He can still feel the spittle flying over his face, see Sirius's neck purple with rage, hear that one word over and over again. _Traitor_.

He feels the burn of that word across his chest as though it's been carved there in blood, as though his face has been kicked in and everything he thought he knew is wrong.

He shouldn't go, not tonight, not when everything Sirius has said is still so raw and the shame of his desires is still so strong. But he goes anyway, rising from the sofa on shaky legs, changing his clothes into something tight and foreign and Apparating to the dark lane behind his usual club.

Once inside, with the music wrapping around him and shots of blue liqueur pouring over him, it doesn't take him long to find what he wants. The man is large, thicker than Remus is used to and much rougher with his thrusts, pinning Remus down and splitting him open.

Remus clenches his jaw and lets the allure of alcohol and forbidden sex suck him under, letting it all go – the war and the truth and all his friends and enemies. He has no one to trust and no one trusts him, so what does it matter?

Tomorrow, he'll stop. He makes the decision as he comes, naked and tired and sleeping with the wrong man, a man who doesn't know him and doesn't want to. He'll tell his friends, at last, that he's a Dark creature and that he likes to fuck men, but that those two concepts aren't actually related – despite what James would assume and Sirius would insist and Peter would decide is logical.

He pulls his clothes back on and heads out into the night, the air tinged green with cold fog.

Tomorrow.

 

-fin-


End file.
